Studying Pelagius is not the point of this article, and while we may not agree with all six theses, we want to make note of the early tendencies of Pelagius to properly interpret Adam’s relationship with God, the nature of Adam's death, and the implications of sin in Adam’s life. It is clear the Pelagius felt strongly that Adam was created to be a mortal human, that each person was responsible for his or her own sin, and that sin was not passed on to children through birth. Ironically, these six theses sound strangely similar to promulgations made by Preterists today; in fact, what we see is very early development of Preterist doctrine and theology. Many Preterists who subscribe to an AD 70 Second Coming of Christ do profess a spiritual death occurring in Genesis 3 at the Fall, but interestingly and contradictory also continue to see a parallel evil permeating all physical creation. The line between Pelagianism and Preterism gets even more blurry when many Preterists indeed confirm that Adam was created a mortal being and that Adam’s sin was not necessarily passed on to future generations until this day.

By the time Augustine was forced to respond to Pelagius and got involved in this controversy in 412, the ideas proposed by Pelagius were gaining ground across Carthage and North Africa. In fact Augustine and other bishops were forced to deal with Pelagianism in a public matter before it got out of hand. In 412, Augustine put together two works (De spiritu et litera - The spirit and the Law, and De peccatorum meritis et remissione libri – The reward for sin and scriptural remission) in which he tries to make a case for the existence of original sin and the absolute requirement for infant baptism. Because Augustine saw evidence for original sin, his arguments revolved around the premise that sin permeates all creation, and that depravity is inherent to all mankind, thus being consistent with his need for the baptism of infants for example.

Augustine framed his argument against Pelagius around the idea that although Adam was created perfectly good by God, Adam’s sin brought about such a huge change in mankind that all creation has become totally and absolutely incapable of doing anything good. In fact, Augustine was so extreme in his view of the depraved world that he actively condemned even the good deeds of non-Christians, teaching that the good deeds performed by non-believers were deeds done in the spirit of Satan . It appears while his extremist position helped put Pelagius in his place it turned many away from the substance of his message.

The situation became such that a third position appeared in the form of Semi-Pelagianism proposed by Vitalis of Carthage in which a compromise between Augustine and Pelagius was presented. This position distanced itself from the extremes proposed by Pelagius and suggested that free-will is only the beginning of faith, and that justification before God can only be obtained through this faith. In opposition, Augustine believed that without the grace placed inside one’s heart, faith cannot blossom, and therefore free-will cannot be responsible for one’s faith.

Semi-Pelagianism was synthesized in these points:

1. In distinguishing between the beginning of faith (initium fidei) and the increase of faith (augmentum fidei), one may refer the former to the power of the free will, while the faith itself and its increase is absolutely dependent upon God;
2. The gratuity of grace is to be maintained against Pelagius in so far as every strictly natural merit is excluded; this, however, does not prevent nature and its works from having a certain claim to grace
3. As regards final perseverance in particular, it must not be regarded as a special gift of grace, since the justified man may of his own strength persevere to the end
4. The granting or withholding of baptismal grace in the case of children depends on the Divine prescience of their future conditioned merits or misdeeds.

Augustine dedicated the rest of his life to fighting Pelagianism, but he was unsuccessful in exterminating it. The debate over these issues continued for another one hundred years or more until Semi-Pelagianism itself was declared a heresy by the Council in Orange in 529.

Augustine was the first to systematically develop and articulate the doctrine of predestination, and virtually all subsequent discussions on the topic of predestination revolved around the Augustinian foundation. To sum-up Augustine’s approach, “he stated that God created humans with the free will to choose between good and evil. By choosing evil they lost their free will fully to do God’s will, and thereafter needed God’s grace to be saved and to live righteously.” (Encyclopedia of Religions, MacMillan; 2nd edition)

In his “On the Predestination of Saints” Augustine declared that “God’s gift of grace is prepared for by God’s prior decision from eternity to predestine some to salvation.” So Augustine in fact claimed that grace is an effect of predestination, not its cause. He even took it one step further by claiming that “God not only in his mercy predestines some to salvation, but in his justice predestines the rest to damnation or reprobation.” His views were maintained by the Church until the Council of Orange gave them the status of orthodoxy, thus making Pelagianism an unacceptable choice. Later on, the Council of Quiercy in 853 declared Augustine’s “double predestination” as unacceptable and declared that “while God surely preelects some to salvation, he merely leaves the remainder to humanity in their freely chosen sin with its predestined consequences of eternal punishment.”

Take two: The Reformation

By the time the Reformation arrived, no major developments took place on the topic of free-will and predestination, but because of Luther’s adoption of predestination, Erasmus wrote his own On the Freedom of the Will in 1524. To this, Luther responded with On the Bondage of the Will, in which he concluded that there isn’t “any possibility of cooperation between God and human will.” Later on, The Lutheran Formula of Concord (1576) adopted Augustine’s basic position on predestination, but interestingly joined predestination and election into a single concept: “The predestination or eternal election of God extends only to the good and beloved children of God, and this the cause of their salvation.” This statement on predestination is obviously overcautious, and that is because of Calvin’s earlier work on the topic.

By 1559, Calvin redeveloped Luther’s view of predestination into what Augustine came up with towards the end of his life: double-predestination. In Institutes Calvin wrote: “By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every person. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation.”

As I already showed here, there was nothing new in Calvin’s view of predestination, and the problem with it was not necessarily its substance, but its cultural and historical context which I believe predisposed Calvin to such theology. Clearly a futurist (eschatologically speaking), Calvin was a theocrat and saw nothing good in the world and people around him, and much, if not ALL of his theology grew out of his futurism and the method in which he framed the world around him. He tried and was successful in creating a strong theocratic government in Geneva in his efforts to fight the corrupt system of what he saw as an evil, sin-filled world. For example, because of his strong beliefs regarding education, Geneva became a place where parents were forced to send their children away to be educated in Calvin’s schools, where adulterous women were killed by drowning, and where the government actively tried to squash out sin by the means of law.

In Book 2 of Institutes, Calvin wrote: “...our nature is not only destitute of all good, but is so fertile in all evils that it cannot remain inactive. Those who have called it concupiscence have used an expression not improper, if it were only added, which is far from being conceded by most persons, that everything in man, the understanding and will, the soul and body, is polluted and engrossed by this concupiscence; or, to express it more briefly, that man is of himself nothing else but concupiscence.” (Institutes, Book 2, Chapter 1)

Calvin had such a negative view of the world, that in Institutes, he dedicates an entire chapter to his idea of how Adam’s fall negatively affected all subsequent generations for eternity. In Institutes Calvin writes: “After the heavenly image in man was effaced, he not only was himself punished by a withdrawal of the ornaments in which he had been arrayed--viz. wisdom, virtue, justice, truth, and holiness, and by the substitution in their place of those dire pests, blindness, impotence, vanity, impurity, and unrighteousness, but he involved his posterity also, and plunged them in the same wretchedness. This is the hereditary corruption to which early Christian writers gave the name of Original Sin, meaning by the term the depravation of a nature formerly good and pure.” (Institutes, Book 2, Chapter 1, Section 5)

Calvin continues: “This timidity, however, could not prevent the rise of a Pelagius with his profane fiction--that Adam sinned only to his own hurt, but did no hurt to his posterity. Satan, by thus craftily hiding the disease, tried to render it incurable. But when it was clearly proved from Scripture that the sin of the first man passed to all his posterity, recourse was had to the cavil, that it passed by imitation, and not by propagation. The orthodoxy, therefore, and more especially Augustine, labored to show, that we are not corrupted by acquired wickedness, but bring an innate corruption from the very womb. It was the greatest impudence to deny this.” (Institutes, Book2, Chapter 1, Section 5)

Calvin was heavily sold on Augustine's theology of original sin, predestination and total depravity. It is evident to anyone that Calvin was simply resurrecting an old argument: Augustine vs. Pelagius, and that his view of an utterly corrupt world stems from his Augustinian view of original sin: “We thus see that the impurity of parents is transmitted to their children, so that all, without exception, are originally depraved.” (Institutes, Book 2, Chapter 1, Section 6) And just as it happened during Augustine’s times, there was no Preterist to counterbalance his views of original sin and the depraved world.

Calvin also sees Paul as teaching his view of original sin: “And the Apostle most distinctly testifies, that "death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned," (Rom. 5:12); that is, are involved in original sin, and polluted by its stain. Hence, even infants bringing their condemnation with them from their mother's womb suffer not for another's, but for their own defect. For although they have not yet produced the fruits of their own unrighteousness, they have the seed implanted in them. Nay, their whole nature is, as it were, a seed-bed of sin, and therefore cannot but be odious and abominable to God.”

Now folks, I cannot guess another’s feelings, but just about now, as a Preterist reading these statements, I might very well throw my hands up in the air, smash my computer to pieces and walk away from this ridiculous argument which we are involved in. But I will do no such thing. Instead, let me try to synthesize what many Preterists believe today:

1. Adam would have physically died even if he had not sinned.
2. Adam’s sin only harmed himself, not the entire human race.
3. Since sin causes death, and since Children do not sin, Children are born the same as Adam before his fall.
4. The Parousia of Christ restored the world to a pre-Adamic state.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Conclusion

To any honest observer and reader, a historical analysis of predestination and Calvinism brings to light many questions which have never been answered to this day, yet millions of Christians continue to subscribe to Calvinism. Even many Preterists continue to buy into Calvin’s views of a totally corrupt world. And how could anyone answer these questions if the more important issue of the Parousia of Christ has never been resolved until Preterism stepped up to the plate and proclaimed that “everything has been made new” and that Adam’s death, and therefore its consequences have been dealt with finally and completely in A.D. 70 at the fall of the Jewish Temple?

Indeed, Calvin was a powerful name in the development of doctrine and dogma and much of his theology has merits and value. But let us all, as Preterists look at the whole structure of Calvinism, which unequivocally appears to be built on the foundation of “original sin and total depravity.” If any other argument would be considered inadequate if its premise is wrong, why then would Calvinism be exempt from severe criticism, and why should we then not put the argument over Calvinism into its proper place: Augustine and Pelagius? And should we do so, how can we then allow Calvin to build systematic theology that affects much theology today without questioning its roots and motivations? Surely you would agree with me that a house with a cracked foundation needs to be torn down and rebuilt!

Now, the efficacy of Preterism is its power to offer answers to futurism’s assertions concerning a depraved world and in doing so we do not apologize and shy away from the obvious truth of the matter. Preterists fearlessly engage futurists frequently when debating these matters. We all agree that futurism, because of its misunderstanding of “the death” and its nature, presents us with a defeatist and fatalistic picture of the world.

You will surely ask me, “How can you dismiss all Calvin’s arguments in their entirety?” My friends, I am not doing such a thing. But on the same token, how can you as Preterists ignore all the common sense you employed when you accepted Preterism as truth and continue to submit to a doctrine built solely on the misconceptions of futurism? Can a futurist come to some valid theological conclusions, as Calvin did? Yes, of course. Can a futurist accurately articulate God’s relationship to the world, the nature of death and salvation? Absolutely not!

Let us all in my next installment discuss the theological and scriptural issues of Calvinism and see how as Preterists we already have in our possession much more gold than we thought Calvinism could ever offer us.